It’s a healthy thing from time to time to ask ourselves why we come to church: to ask ourselves what we’re doing here. There’s something in one of today’s scripture readings that brings that question to mind.Every now and then I (and probably every other parish clergyperson) get approached by people who don’t go to church but say they want their children to have some grounding in Christian education; which to them usually means some general awareness of ethics and morality, and some degree of cultural literacy about the Bible. They’re thinking of it as a short-term job they can outsource, they don’t themselves really get involved, and it never works out (if the parents don’t think it’s worth their time why should their kids feel any differently?) The most extreme example of this in my experience happened many years ago, when I was going to seminary in New York City, there was a well-to-do woman who wanted someone to tutor her two children in Christian education at their apartment on the Upper East Side, and someone referred her to me. She was willing to pay handsomely for it, I think partly for this reason: her husband, the children’s father, was not to know anything about it. She had it all planned out: I would come once a week at 4:15, when the kids had gotten home from school and had their snack, and leave at 5:15, before their father came home from work; and if, as sometimes happened, he got home early, I was to exit the back door of the apartment and take the freight elevator down to the street, making good my escape. I passed on this offer. I don’t mean to be snide about all this: these folks all have an idea – of some kind –that what goes on in church is something their kids should know about, that they’re not going to get anywhere else, and they’re right about that. What they don’t get is that there’s an infinitely bigger picture involved: that it’s about God, and therefore about how the world really works, how we each fit into that, day to day, and how our understanding of all that evolves, over the course of our lives. The truth is that “Christian education” never really ends. And of course it’s not just lazy parents who don’t get this. I had an email this past week from a friend who’s an educational consultant, a very smart and committed guy, wanting to talk about a project he’s working on which has to do with the chaos and disruption and hostility that’s in the world today, and a curriculum he’s trying to develop (from kindergarten through college) that would help young people deal with that. And he said he wants to talk with me about the place of values and ethics in that curriculum. So he may be missing that big picture as well. And my first response was to send him something I came across years ago, which I’m going to read to you now. It’s from a letter, written in 1959 by the psychologist Carl Jung, to a woman who had asked him to explain a comment of his she’d read in a newspaper, which was this: “Among all my patients in the second half of life...every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.” The woman wanted to know what Jung meant by the phrase “religious outlook”, and this is what he wrote back to her:

When you study the mental history of the world, you see that people since times immemorial had a general teaching or doctrine about the wholeness of the world. Originally and down to our days, they were considered to be holy traditions taught to the young people as a preparation for their future life. This has been the case in primitive tribes as well as in highly differentiated civilizations. The teaching had always a “philosophical” and “ethical” aspect. In our civilization this spiritual background has gone astray. Our Christian doctrine has lost its grip to an appalling extent, chiefly because people don’t understand it any more. Thus one of the most important instinctual activities of our mind has lost its object. As these views deal with the world as a whole, they create also a wholeness of the individual, so much so, that for instance a primitive tribe loses its vitality, when it is deprived of its specific religious outlook. People are no more rooted in their world and lose their orientation. They just drift. That is very much our condition, too. The need for a meaning of their lives remains unanswered, because the rational, biological goals are unable to express the irrational wholeness of human life. Thus life loses its meaning. That is the problem of the “religious outlook” in a nutshell. The problem itself cannot be settled by a few slogans. It demands concentrated attention, much mental work and, above all, patience, the rarest thing in our restless and crazy time.

“…a general teaching about the wholeness of the world”, in Jung’s words. In faith we see that that’s the presence of God in the world: the unity of God’s creation, that we are part of. That’s the big picture. That’s what we behold here in church, what we soak ourselves in, week in and week out. It’s part of what we mean when we talk about growing in the knowledge and love of God: which, in Jung’s words, involves concentrated attention, mental work, and patience: not a bad description of what it means to be a churchgoer.I’m talking about all this today because of the passage we just heard from the letter to the Ephesians, which offers some practical examples of how the way we live our lives – we’re talking values and ethics here – flows directly from our big picture, is entirely dependent on it.For a few weeks now we’ve been hearing from the first half of Ephesians. The main point of that part of the letter is that God brings us all together in Christ, that all of humanity are God’s children. The second half of the letter is ethical and moral teaching that’s basically an elaboration of what this big picture means for how we live. The first verse of today’s passage begins this way: “Putting away falsehood, let us speak the truth to our neighbors…” This seems like a no-brainer, of course, Values & Ethics 101, tell the truth. But then the verse follows up with the reason for this behavior: “…[L]et us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.” So when we don’t speak the truth to our neighbors, we’re not telling the truth to ourselves; we’re actually denying the truth; and we’re not living in the real world. You see what a huge difference this makes. It means we have a much more personal stake in telling the truth: it’s not just something that’s nice to doThe same kind of thnking operates in other verses in today’s passage. “Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly.” Again, a no-brainer, yes? That’s what would naturally come to mind: people should work to earn the fruits of their own labors, to deserve them; and they should respect other people’s property. But Ephesians gives quite a different reason. It says, “…let them labor and work honestly so as to have something to share with the needy.” The purpose of our labor is to share; because we are members of one another. God created us to live in communion with God and with each other. That’s not a wish, or a hope: we say it’s the truth. And the more consistently we live according to this knowledge, the better are all our lives; because we’re living in the truth. And one final example: “Let no evil talk come out of your mouths….” Well, we’ve heard this before, yes? “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” But here, it’s grounded in the big picture:“Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to whose who hear.” There’s a constant awareness that our lives are part of the life of God. And you see what practical application these words have to our daily lives; and how directly they proceed from what we believe about God, and the world God created. And as far as “Christian education” never ending goes, I know that I for one need to be reminded of these things on a continuing basis. It’s like any other kind of exercise: if we don’t regularly refresh ourselves in the big picture, we lose touch with the truth, and with the real world, and “values” and “ethics” that have real roots; and we just drift. So let us thank God for our church, for our community of faith. Let us thank God for Holy Scripture, and the chance to hear it together. Let us thank God for all the practices of our faith that have been handed on to us, that we maintain and hand on ourselves. Let us thank God for the big picture: the way, the truth, and the life. Amen.